The present invention relates to an electronic dictionary with an improved word search system.
An electronic dictionary has recently been introduced in which translation is performed between a plurality of languages, for example, between English and Japanese, in such a manner that a word in one language is translated into a corresponding word in another language and the corresponding word is displayed at a display section.
In a conventional electronic dictionary which deals with translation, for example, in the case involving Japanese, character keys for letters and kana character keys are arranged on a keyboard and a word is specified by the key-in operation. When word data is entered with the keys as described above in a system of an electronic dictionary, a word corresponding to the input word data is searched in the dictionary memory and the searched word is displayed at the display section. However, as may be apparent from the above example, a number of input keys for specifying a word are arranged. For example, even in an electronic dictionary which is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,932,859 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,159,536, character keys for letters are arranged on a keyboard, resulting in a device large in size and complex in operation.